 Well, it's a pleasure to come and join you all this morning when I was in the state legislature in Oregon I was immersed in energy issues. So Oregon has a conservation ethic and a renewable ethic going back to bills were passed 30 years ago bills such as Making the beaches public beaches throughout our state such as having the first recycling bill in the nation And third a major land use bill where all of Oregon is zoned with essentially growth boundaries around every city to Be able to create more sustainable Livable metropolitan areas while protecting farmland and forest land those are some of the ancestors of the energy and the environment conversation we continue to have in Oregon and certainly Part of the reason and driver in Oregon now is that we also see it as economic opportunity an opportunity to create products That we can sell outside of the state and hopefully outside of the United States Opportunity to create our own power and thereby keep our energy dollars inside the boundaries of our economy Rather than seeing them exported. So that's a little bit of the background with which I brought to to DC and It is a pleasure to be able to come and be part of a national and really an international conversation about energy and the environment and for so long and I think the the skit that you were referring to captures it it well for so long we in America have Recognized the downside of our addiction to oil through many many presidencies We have recognized and that the fact that shipping dollars overseas is not this not strengthen our economy When I was a campaign for the Senate because of the spike in oil prices That was about two billion dollars a day now It's about a billion dollars a day a billion dollars a day shipped overseas Which is very good for the economies abroad selling the oil But very bad for the United States in terms of those dollars leaving our economy not continuing to circulate through our retail stores And through our families and creating jobs here Meanwhile in terms of national security it becomes an imperative When your energy economy is dependent upon resources ranging around the world to protect access to those resources And that's a very high national security cost Various experts have estimated it and translated it into dollars per gallon I think the highest estimate I've ever seen is equivalent of five dollars per gallon for a gallon of gas in terms of Security apparatus necessary to sustain the flow of oil And indeed there's another national security angle in which the Petro dollars find their their way into the hands of terrorist organizations as Some national security experts have noted that the wars we're fighting now. We are funding both sides Which is something to make a stop and think about the national security implications of our energy policy so Since there's been so much conversation about The challenges of our oil addiction Why not have a plan to address it? Part of the challenge we have in a democracy is we change presidents and teams every four years How do you sustain a plan that will take a couple decades to implement in that regard the the plan that I've laid out with my colleagues Tom Udall and Tom Carper and Michael Bennett is to create a national Energy Security Council that would be in the office of president and that would have the role of continuing to bring to bear ideas and proposed legislation proposed Regulations proposed policy initiatives that would keep us on the course to ending our dependence on Now the estimates when we look two decades down the road the estimates of how much oil would be imported from overseas So this is not including Canada potentially Mexico Mexico is probably not to be an exporter two decades from now That's about in the range of six million barrels per day six to seven million barrels per day Therefore we need a plan to be able to Reduce our consumption by at least that much and hopefully a significant amount amount more And the plan that we put together calls for reductions Equivalent to 8.3 million barrels per day, and that's just the number that Float out of the the best estimates the various policies that we can bring to bear And one of those policies is to change the consumption in motor vehicles We all recognize that that is a the biggest consumer of petroleum We are right now Tremendous market opportunity that opportunity first. We have hybrids. We've come well familiar with We have plug-in hybrids that are about to become part of the market We have the the strategy the technological strategy Characterized by the Chevrolet Volt, which is to have electric car with a back up Motorized engine that can recharge the batteries of the electric car if you find yourself out of range if you will so you're not you're not stranded We have the Nissan Volt Excuse me leaf, which will be arriving in short order and some of you has anybody been following the Tour de France You see the Nissan leaf ads with Lance Armstrong saying you know for his entire lifetime. He's been cycling behind Cars or trucks and everything they always had in common was an exhaust exhaust pipe sitting right in front of it And finally he has the opportunity to cycle behind the cars that that don't and so they're they're putting significant marketing emphasis or weight into the Nissan leaf The process of pursuing plug-in cars Gives us an opportunity to save the cool with a 3.2 billion barrels per day That's the single biggest factor to pursue that senator Lamar Alexander Republican from Tennessee Senator Byron Dorgan Democrat from North Dakota and myself put together an electric vehicle bill that will create electric vehicle deployment communities to try to Solve the problem of the chicken and the egg in which you need Plug-in infrastructure along with the deployment of plug-in cars until it kind of has the significant Market share to take off and we hope that what we will learn from those deployment communities And that the emphasis in the bill is that those communities would all be very have different sets of characteristics Would enable us to have the best possible strategies for the nation in terms of encouraging this this transition A second piece is the efficient movement of freight We have out in Oregon a non-profit in the Cascade Sierra and it is Harder to the trucking industry and it brings together all the latest technological opportunities to make trucks more efficient from automatic tire inflation To small portable generators that enable trucks to power up their electronics without running their diesel engine and to plug-in stations where Truckers stop to airfoil technology and all that when you save a Mile or two or three per gallon adds up to a tremendous amount of savings We can also proceed to encourage a shift of a significant share 10% of the freight That would otherwise be carried on trucks onto barges and rail Some of you may have heard the statistic, but I think it's a stunning statistic, and it is how far Can a single gallon a Fuel propel a ton of freight on rail Anybody know the answer to that Right down here our expert panel them anybody anybody anyone else want to 436 I hear down there and You're referring to 436 meters 436 miles miles Well over 400, and I don't know if that's the latest number. I've seen various numbers 436 472 But over 400 miles with a single gallon in the so so moving freight by rail and by barb is enormously Efficient but having strategies that encourage in that in addition to making freight on the roads more efficient and save 2 million barrels of oil per day The third strategy is to have smarter metropolitan transportation options And if any of you folks been out to Portland, Oregon Fair number, okay. Well, I tell you we have they've been experimenting in Portland, and we have a light rail system We have now created a Streetcar system that is growing and there are communities around the country that are looking at the possibility of adding streetcars The advantages they operate like a bus line But they are most both more energy efficient and because they are permanent infrastructure They really encourage development along with the lines and so they're very interesting economic development Opportunity in Eugene, Oregon. We have rapid transit buses. Many communities are experience experimenting with moving to more electrification of buses or Natural gas which produce less carbon dioxide amount of energy expended providing simply the opportunity for bicycle paths and Other mechanisms in the metropolitan area all of these things can combine a new term has been coined in Oregon to try to capture that whole set of Opportunities and the term is the intertwined and so I don't know that it's spread beyond Oregon yet But if you hear something about the intertwined That's the complex of alternatives for transportation that get people off the off the roads This is the third Largest potential strategy of course of 1.75 million barrels per day savings Alternative fuels isn't all about If you will the process of being more efficient It also includes Substitution and natural gas and advanced biofuels create a substitution opportunity that keeps dollars here in America And we've had a tremendous growth through new drilling technologies in the availability of natural gas so that is a significant possibility now since I was a Knee high to a grasshopper We've had natural gas compressed natural gas being used on on forklifts We have certainly some bus transportation systems that employ it But it could be used in a much wider way for medium and heavy-duty vehicles Certainly in Oregon, we're very interested in cellulosic ethanol We have one of the first commercial plants going in it converts popular trees into fuel in Boardman, Oregon Now if that's successful, it will pave the path for other opportunities that will include our forest which Millions of acres of second-growth forest that need to be thin and to provide a lot of biomass that could be converted in this in this fashion and then finally Homes and buildings and this is a small factor because not a lot of homes and buildings are heated with heating fuel But for those that are it makes sense to pay attention increase the energy efficiency of their homes because there's savings of about 200,000 murals a day now Our our panel will have a lot more details and a lot more information but this is kind of the the bones of a strategy and What's really lacking is not the technology what's lacking is the political will There are economic interests that certainly would like to see us continue our dependence on overseas oil But if we think about our responsibility as a governing community our responsibility is to Think about how to position the United States strategically and how to take on not only the financial issues National security issues, but also our stewardship of the environment and energy planning is deeply connected to all three of those And if we think in terms of strategic positioning and we're looking down the road We're looking at China which is going to have a vast increase in its demand for oil other growing economies We can only anticipate that the cost of fuel is going to go up We hit a peak of about four dollars per gallon out in Oregon and now we're down a little below three dollars But I have no doubt that in five years or ten years. It could be six or seven or eight Better for us to shift from that overseas oil To energy created manufactured right here in America and when we shift to electricity We shift and have the opportunity to shift to indeed forms of renewable energy wind wave Geothermal solar and so forth. So That's the outlines. Thank you for the opportunity to come and give an introduction to it And thank you to all the panelists for coming with their expertise to help drive the energy conversation forward